Burton Richter
1931–2018, Brooklyn, New York, USA, Palo Alto, California, USA
American experimental physicist who built the SPEAR collider at SLAC and co-discovered the J/ψ particle, the first evidence for the charm quark.
An MIT-trained physicist who moved to Stanford to work on electron machines, Richter championed electron-positron storage rings when the idea was unpopular, building SPEAR in 1972. On 10 November 1974 his team found a spectacularly narrow resonance at 3.1 GeV — simultaneously seen by Ting's group at Brookhaven — an event called the 'November Revolution' that established quarks as real constituents of matter. He later directed SLAC and championed the Superconducting Super Collider.
Nobel-winning work
Richter's 1976 Nobel Prize honored the discovery of 'a new kind of heavy elementary particle' — the J/ψ meson. At SPEAR, the electron-positron collider he had designed at SLAC, his group recorded in November 1974 an extremely narrow resonance at 3.1 GeV, orders of magnitude more long-lived than any known hadron.
The particle proved to be a bound state of a new quark, charm, and its antiquark — a 'hydrogen atom' of the strong interaction whose spectrum (charmonium) verified the quark model and QCD. The discovery triggered the rapid acceptance of the Standard Model's quark generations.
Workplaces: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)
United States